Abstract:

The increasing complexity of markets and social contexts need highly educated professionals to face due to the complexity of contemporary challenges where different scale of problems and stakeholders are involved and pushed academies to re-structure their traditional educational offer and redefining their boundaries towards the external eco-system, searching for more sustainable, social and economic paradigms, opening up novel knowledge synergies. Future leaders must become firstly “innovation leaders” and their “DNA” needs to be shaped for this task in terms of mindset, skills and cognitive attitude. It requires novel types of cognitive approaches related to different ways of integrating disciplinary domains. For this purpose, the traditional approach to disciplines and teaching in western sciences seems to be unable to support the education of these new kind of professionals. Universities are only partially facing this challenge. Nevertheless some practices experimented worldwide are showing the growing importance of new pedagogical approaches where interdisciplinarity is a key milestone. And new theoretical models are emerging to drive the transition of universities toward this change, linking with a larger ecosystem made by both private and public organizations, within business and policies contexts.

According to this premise, the paper presents the IDEA – InterDisciplinary Education Agenda: an essential driver for innovation, project. A EU Tempus project to improve the exploitation of a new knowledge integration in the interdisciplinary area of Engineering, Design and Business at higher education institutes from an industrial perspective, improving innovation as well as academy–industry relations. The main objectives of IDEA were focused to effectively bridge the gaps within the Education, Research, Innovation and support current efforts of industry to cope with global economic challenges, to strengthen academy-industry collaboration in the domain of innovation, emphasising the role of HEIs and to stimulate innovative integration and knowledge synergies of engineering, design and business disciplines within a wide range of projects and industries.

Keywords:

Interdisciplinarity, education, innovation leaders, European Tempus project.